Examining Basque and Japanese Roots
Finding interesting common ground between distant languages
Introduction
For speakers of Basque (Euskara) and Japanese (日本語), one particular curiosity that may arise is the number of similar words or concepts found between them. While these are often not strong enough to form a direct linguistic connection, there are enough similarities for one to understand that at some distant point in time the ancestors of these people had some type of contact and/or shared or exchanged cultural elements between them, which is not a stretch considering both of these civilizations are known for oceanside ports and deep histories of shipbuilding.
Syntax
Although Basque is an ergative-absolutive language (similar to Tibetan or the Inuit-Aleut languages), the word order generally follows the subject-object-verb pattern found in Japanese. This will sound foreign to native speakers of subject-verb-object languages such as English, Chinese, Portuguese, and Indo-European languages in general.
For example, the sentence “I had cheese and fruit for lunch” would read “cheese and fruit for lunch had I”.
Japanese and Basque are also both agglutinative languages, meaning that suffixes are used to mark and modify words instead of prefixes or preposition words. The word alignment and agglutinative nature give each language a familiar tone and rhythm to the other, which is why Basque is recently being added as a language offered by universities in Japan.
Similarities
There are are few similar words or phrases with somewhat related meaning between Basque and Japanese. Here are a few examples:
As we can see, there are some very similar words between these two languages that are about as distant as possible from English. In fact, the above similarities are unique to Vasconic and Japonic languages.
Additionally, these are core words used early in the development of language to describe basic concepts to describe whether something does or did exist, and things that would have been closely available to our prehistoric ancestors, such as “bird” and “older brother”.
Writing System
Japanese uses three writing systems: Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. Basque today is written using a Latin-based script, however in the past it was written using a Paleo-Hispanic script which is largely syllable-based like the Japanese writing systems.
Some of the Paleo-Hispanic characters appear to line up with one of the Hiragana or Katakana characters, such as a, i, n, and ti / chi.
While there are more differences than similarities, it is still worth noting that ancient Basque was written in a script which is much closer to Japanese writing systems than the modern Latin alphabet in use today.
Conclusion
Although these two languages are not linguistically related and are spoken by people who live nowhere near each other, the similarities that arise when examining these two languages together are interesting and they reveal a cultural thread that pre-dates modern history.
Artifacts such as the Hand of Irulegi found in Basque Country which demonstrate the use of Paleo-Hispanic writing systems are changing the way historians and linguists view this language and how long it has been spoken in the area. There is some evidence to suggest that an ancestor of Basque was once spoken all across the Western-most part of a much-different looking Europe than what we have today (in which Ireland and Basque Country are connected by land, explaining the deep roots, traditions, and genetics shared by these people).
Long ago, when the Earth’s coastlines were much different than they are today, people would have been able to travel along different lines than what are available now. While we may not know for quite some time (or ever) what shared connections between the Basque and Japanese people create the overlap found in the language and other cultural areas such as music and food, one thing is for certain: it makes for an interesting topic of study.
